Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is contemplating forcing a vote on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, when Congress reconvenes in September. The vote would put a lot of vulnerable Republicans in the tough position of going with a highly qualified candidate in Garland, or emphasizing the fact that they are implicitly endorsing the idea of Donald Trump picking the next SCOTUS justices. Reid just got some help for his strategy courtesy of conservative legal scholars who think a more liberal court is preferable to a Trump presidency.
“The court is important, to be sure ? but not nearly that important,” said retired Temple University Law School Professor David Post, who now writes for the conservative website the Volokh Conspiracy. “With all due respect to my colleagues who might feel differently, this one strikes me as a no-brainer.” The next president might end up only filling a single seat on the court, Post said. “The idea that it makes sense to trade a single justice for all of Trump’s terrible baggage: his bullying, his ignorance, his appalling tendency to shoot his mouth off without thinking, and all the rest of it ? strikes me as thoroughly preposterous,” he added.
Ilya Somin, who teaches law at George Mason University and also blogs for the Volokh Conspiracy, argues that a Trump presidency might even be worse for the courts than a Clinton one.
“Trump has a terrible record on constitutional issues,” he said. “He seeks to gut freedom of speech and constitutional property rights, and undermine constitutional constraints on executive power even more than Bush and Obama have.”
“Moreover, over the long term, a Trump victory increases the likelihood that the GOP will become a big-government xenophobic party hostile to civil liberties and opposed to most constitutional constraints on government power ? much like the far-right nationalist parties of Western Europe, whose platforms are very similar to his,” he continued. “Such a party is likely to do far more to undermine the Constitution than even a Hillary Clinton victory.”
Ouch. Those vulnerable Republicans are going to have a very unpleasant choice come September—stick with Mitch McConnell and Trump or heed to the increasingly loud chorus of Republicans shouting "never Trump."
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/j0ucW9tJh3s/-Conservative-legal-scholars-would-rather-have-a-liberal-Supreme-Court-than-a-President-Trump
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